Volkswagen says goodbye to the Beetle this week

Volkswagen is bringing an end to its much loved Beetle car this week after seven decades of production and three generations of designs.

Volkswagen is ending production of its famed Beetle. Picture: Manjunath Kiran/AFPSource:AFP

Volkswagen is ending production of the last version of its Beetle model this week at its plant in Puebla, Mexico.

It’s the end of the road for a vehicle that has symbolised many things over a history spanning eight decades since 1938.

It has been a part of Germany’s darkest hours as a never-realised Nazi prestige project. A symbol of Germany’s post-war economic renaissance and rising middle-class prosperity. An example of globalisation, sold and recognised all over the world. An emblem of the 1960s counterculture in the United States.

Above all, the car remains a landmark in design, as recognisable as the Coca-Cola bottle.

Volkswagen organised a Beetle roulette, with 10 red and green Beetles in the Volkswagen stadium in Wolfsburg, West Germany in 1953 to celebrate the 500,000 cars produced after WW II. Picture: AP/Henry BrueggemannSource:AP

Beetles are assembled in lines at the Volkswagen auto works plant in Wolfsburg, West Germany in 1954. Picture: AP/Albert RiethausenSource:AP

A Volkswagen Beetle is unloaded in Germany in 1977, as the first shipment of 1600 Beetles made in Mexico arrives. Picture: AP/Heinz DucklauSource:AP

The car’s original design — a rounded silhouette with seating for four or five, nearly vertical windshield and the air-cooled engine in the rear — can be traced back to Austrian engineer Ferdinand Porsche, who was hired to fulfil Adolf Hitler’s project for a “people’s car” that would spread auto ownership the way the Ford Model T had in the U.S.

Aspects of the car bore similarities to the Tatra T97, made in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and to sketches by Hungarian engineer Bela Barenyi published in 1934.

Mass production of what was called the KdF-Wagen, based on the acronym of the Nazi labour organisation under whose auspices it was to be sold, was cancelled due to World War II. Instead, the massive new plant in what was then countryside east of Hanover turned out military vehicles, using forced labourers from all over Europe under miserable conditions.

Re-launched as a civilian carmaker under supervision of the British occupation authorities, the Volkswagen factory was transferred in 1949 to the Germany government and the state of Lower Saxony, which still owns part of the company.

By 1955, the millionth Beetle — officially called the Type 1 — had rolled off the assembly line in what was now the town of Wolfsburg.

A 1971 version of the famous Bug.Source:Supplied

A 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.Source:Supplied

The United States became Volkswagen’s most important foreign market, peaking at 563,522 cars in 1968, or 40 per cent of production.

“Unlike in West Germany, where its low price, quality and durability stood for a new post-war normality, in the United States the Beetle’s characteristics lent it a profoundly unconventional air in a car culture dominated by size and showmanship,” wrote Bernhard Rieger in his 2013 history, The People’s Car.

Production at Wolfsburg ended in 1978 as newer front drive models like the Golf took over. But the Beetle wasn’t dead yet. Production went on in Mexico from 1967 until 2003 — longer than the car had been made in Germany.

Nicknamed the “vochito,” the car made itself at home as a rugged, Mexican-made “carro del pueblo.”

A new Beetle is lifted inside a delivery tower in 2012. Picture: AP/Michael SohnSource:AP

The sleek 2013 to 2016 model.Source:Supplied

The New Beetle — a completely retro version build on a modified Golf platform — resurrected some of the old Beetle’s cute, unconventional aura in 1998 under CEO Ferdinand Piech, Ferdinand Porsche’s grandson.

In 2012, the Beetle’s design was made a bit sleeker.

The end of the Beetle comes at a turning point for Volkswagen as it rebounds from a scandal over cars rigged to cheat on diesel emissions tests. The company is gearing up for mass production of the battery-driven compact ID.3, a car that the company predicts will have an impact like that of the Beetle and the Golf by bringing electric mobility to a mass market.

The last of 5961 Final Edition versions of the Beetle is headed for a museum after ceremonies in Puebla on July 10 to mark the end of production.